Understanding your customer’s behavior is essential to making improvements in your processes and growing your business. It gives useful insights into how customers get to your store, what do they buy, what features do they like most, what products they buy more often, what is their favorite payment method, what causes them to stop buying etc. It also gives you an opportunity to foresee your potential customers. Once you understand your customer’s needs, you can make business decisions accordingly.

What data to collect?

You can collect various types of customer data that can help you grasp an understanding of your customer’s behavior. Following is a list of the types of data you as a business analyst or store owner should gather and maintain a record of.

Contact Information:

Maintaining a record of your customer’s contact information is one of the key marketing tools. Repeat customers can significantly contribute to your store’s sales if you reach out to them on specific events with special offers.

User experience data:

Learn how your customer’s experience was with your store. You can use this data to prioritize certain features and try to provide them with a better shopping experience.

Referral source:

Customers can come to your store through multiple sources such as search engines, email, social media, advertisement, a friend’s recommendation etc. Getting to know the source of your customer’s visit can help you define your marketing strategy or focus and invest more on one avenue than others.

Website activity:

Some companies tend to ignore this data if an activity on a website does not lead to conversion. This data is equally important as this will give you an understanding as to why a click did not turn into a conversion. Analyzing what pages a customer visit, how much they spend on a page and why they revert from a page can help you reach better customers.

Personal interests & preferences:

Collect customer’s personal tastes and preferences to create content that is interesting and resonates with them. It will make your customers feel valued and help you decide how to organize your store.

Demographic information:

Demographic information can help you target more relevant and potentially interested customers. If you know which age group, countries or regions most of your customers visit your store from, you can target them with effective measures.

How to collect information in Magento?

Magento is one of the most popular open source e-commerce platforms today. According to research conducted in March 2016, Magento holds 29.1% of the total market share. It is the 2nd most used platform after WooCommerce. Magento is preferred by big companies and large stores as it offers advanced level management features and is more secure. With the launch of Magento 2 in November 2015, it has achieved better performance, scalability, improved page caching, and well-organized business user tools.

There are many ways to collect customer information in Magento 2. The easiest one is to use an FME extension for Magento 2 called Magento 2 order attributes. It is a powerful tool to get the necessary data from customers. Magento 2 add field to checkout extension is used to add an unlimited number of custom fields to registration and checkout pages. You can effectively manage collected data from the admin panel.

This extension helps merchants to add custom order attribute in Magento 2 and collect the above mentioned and other necessary information about customers on registration and checkout pages. The extra information can help you analyze the changing in customer behavior and you will be better prepared to serve your customer the next time they visit your store. The extra information can also be valuable for advertising of new products and services during campaigns. With Magento custom checkout, Customers can upload documents, images, type their own text, select from available options, leave comments etc. It supports multiple field types such as Text field, Text area, Checkbox, Radio button, Drop down, Data, Multiple select, Yes/No, static text. Some features of the Magento 2 custom checkout fields extension are given below.

Key Features:

- Supports 9 types of different custom fields
- You can select registration and any checkout step like payment, billing, shipping, review to add custom fields to
- You can assign additional customer attributes to specific products or categories. These attributes will only be visible when you have those products in cart.
- Custom fields can be displayed in emails and PDFs.
- You can choose in which order the attributes should be displayed.